Automatic tobacco harvesters are now in wide use, especially in the flue-cured tobacco production regions of the United States. In an automatic tobacco harvester one finds the heart of the harvester to be the leaf defoliating and leaf conveying assemblies. The defoliating assembly defoliates the leaves from respective stalks passing through the defoliator assembly, while the conveying assemblies disposed adjacent the defoliator assembly conveys the defoliated leaves away from the defoliator assembly toward an area where the leaves are collected.
Charles W. Suggs, the Inventor of the present invention, developed what is often referred to as the rubber spiral type defoliator, shown in U.S. Pat. No. 2,834,174. The Suggs' rubber type spiral defoliators have been and are presently extensively used in production tobacco harvesters manufactured and sold in the United States, Canada and other tobacco producing areas of the world. While such defoliators have performed more than satisfactorily, it is known and appreciated that some field losses can occur with these spiral type defoliators and other types of leaf defoliators as well. Various supporting defoliating mechanisms such as scavengers and gleaners have been added to the basic defoliating mechanism of tobacco harvesters to help minimize field losses. See U.S. Pat. Nos. 3,955,345, 3,955,357 and 3,841,071 for examples of these and other devices that have been devised and employed in tobacco harvesters to minimize field losses.
Tobacco leaves generally grow outwardly from the tobacco stalks horizontally, and in the harvesting operation with defoliators such as the Suggs' spiral type, all tobacco leaves passing below the defoliators become a part of the defoliated swath. However, with certain varities of tobacco and in crops exposed to certain environmental conditions, one finds that certain leaves on the stalks tend to extend generally upwardly along side the stalk, as contrasted to the normal horizontal extension. In such cases leaves that would usually be a part of the defoliated swath extend and curl over the defoliators because of their upward extension angle, and consequently during the harvesting operation these leaves escape defoliation during the harvesting operation.
Finally, the vast majority of automatic tobacco harvesters being used today are of the self-propelled type which generally are used by relatively large farmers, many of which farm 40 or more acres of tobacco. Nevertheless, there remains many smaller tobacco farmers who also encounter labor problems and who have a need for an automatic tobacco harvester, but cannot justify the cost of a self-propelled model because of the small acreage of tobacco being tended. This emphasizes the need for an efficient tractor mounted tobacco harvester, wherein the tobacco harvester would be designed and adapted to readily mount to an already accessible tractor on the farm. By utilizing an already accessible tractor as the prime mover for the harvester, the cost to the small tobacco farmer for the tractor mounted tobacco harvester would be substantially reduced and the cost thereof could in many cases be justified.